how to enable defender again?

[emilmuhi6]

i removed windows defender in windows 11 but i want to get it back again without reseting my pc what do i have to do to get it back again ? please help

[MNLierman]

I don't think you can. There isn't a restore option. I'm watching the issues trying to find someone who has successfully done what you are asking. I really can't reinstall Windows but it looks like I may have to. You can try an In-place Upgrade like I did. Go to uupdump, download that and run it, it will run a script that downloads a bunch of files, and what you end up with is a Windows 11 ISO that will match or exceed your version of Windows 11 which is what you want for this. When you do an in-place upgrade and it matches or exceeds your version of Windows, the registry is migrated and you end up with sort of a clean install of Windows without resetting.

If that is too complicated for you, you could Google Windows 11 ISO and download it directly from Microsoft and if you haven't taken any recent big upgrades then it should meet or exceed your version and migrate your registry, thus re-enabling and fixing Defender.

Unfortunately, and I found this out the hard way like everyone else, it is NOT possible to disable Defender in WIndows 11 anymore without corrupting Updates, Windows Store, and the Windows Firewall. Things are too intertwined, and Microsoft engineers did NOT do this on purpose. It just happens. Windows is 30 years old and they are working fast in developement, they have 10 different teams that merge code for each release. It gets messy when you're this large of a company and 80% of the world uses your OS. So I don't blame them, it is what it is.

If you have System Restore turned on and you disabled Defender within the last 30 days, you could potentially use that too.